Pinger

A web application that let's you schedule HTTP requests and setup alerts based on the responses.

Why would I use it?

Pinger is a good open source alternative for website monitoring. Set up an alert to notify via email when your site is down.

Running on Heroku

These instructions assume you have a good understanding of Heroku. If you're having troubles or find a bug with any of these steps, please add a GitHub issue.

• Create an app on Heroku on the cedar stack
• Setup Redis
  • Add the Redis To Go add-on
  • In the config directory, copy redis_config.yml.example to redis_config.yml
  • Fill in the values provided by the add-on
• Setup Resque
  • In the config directory, copy resque_config.yml.example to resque_config.yml
  • The web_user and web_pass are the login credentials for viewing your queues at the yourapp.herokuapp.com/resque
• Deploy to Heroku

Running this application requires 3 running processes: a web server, worker, and scheduler. This can get quite expensive on Heroku, as they charge $0.05/hour per process. To run this app for free, try this:

• Create 3 Heroku apps, one for each process. For example: pinger-web, pinger-worker and pinger-scheduler
• Only install the Redis To Go add-on on the worker app
• Make sure all 3 apps have the same DATABASE_URL environment variable
• Make sure the web app runs the web process only, the worker app runs the worker process only and the scheduler app runs the scheduler process only

Technologies

Pinger is built on, and makes use of:

• Ruby on Rails - the web application framework
• Resque - background job queueing, scheduling and processing
• Cucumber - high level, acceptance-style testing
• RSpec - low level, unit-style testing

Notes

Although Pinger is pretty stable, it's very much a work-in-progress. Contributions are welcome.